In television production, and more particularly news automation, the number of combinations of video, audio, digital video effects generators and other devices needed to create the unique events required to create a TV news program can easily number in the thousands. Managing the events created by the combination of devices can prove cumbersome and time consuming. Thus, an operator's decision to modify a particular event typically will require modification of all the individual variations of that event as well which could easily number in the hundreds. It is therefore apparent that many errors can occur in the hundreds of variations.
Some have attempted to solve this issue by breaking up the events into smaller discrete events that handle a single action, i.e. controlling audio fades, video switching, etc. The theory being that modifying one of these discrete events is easier than modifying a more complex event that consists of different actions. The drawback to this approach is that one must take these discrete events and put them together each time they need to be used. In other words, one would have to build each event every time they needed to use it. This significantly increases the time required to build a news program to the point where it cannot be considered a viable solution to the problem.
Other approaches proposed include the “Builder Utilities” that can, based on parameters, automatically generate all the combinations for that particular event. Using this approach will generate combinations that will never be used or do not make logical sense. This approach also requires that the user re-run this utility whenever a change occurs to a base event that served as the foundation for the various combinations arising from that event. Overall, this approach has proven cumbersome and wasteful.